


is that a wrench in your pocket or are you just happy to see me

by jonphaedrus



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Belligerent Sexual Tension, Blind author, Disabled Character, M/M, Screen Reader Friendly, Slap Slap Kiss, Visually Impaired Character, nero tol scaeva playing low status to five hundred ball bearings, nobody likes nero, this is a plot point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 01:42:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30132096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: Jessie Jaye has worked at Garlond Ironworks Body, Autoshop, & Hackerspace for exactly thirteen days, nine hours, eight minutes, and twenty-seven seconds when she meets Nero Scaeva.
Relationships: Cid nan Garlond/Nero tol Scaeva
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	is that a wrench in your pocket or are you just happy to see me

**Author's Note:**

> i straight up 100% forgot that i'd written TWO different versions of this one scene and went and found them and discovered that every single joke was so good that i had to post it or i would never forgive myself.

~~In hindsight~~ Backtractively, the handwriting on the wall is in size fourteen font and Jessie still can’t read it without squinting.

When Cid hands her work contract over for her to sign, directly above the final signature line is a fine-print disclaimer that reads, when Jessie lifts her bifocals to see it, squinting: _*Note: By_ _signing to_ _begin_ _your employment with “Garlond Ironworks_ _Body_ _,_ _Autoshop_ _, and Hackerspace,”_ _you confirm that you are not_ _Nero Scaeva_ _, you are in no way affiliated to_ _Nero Scaeva_ _, you are not_ _accepting this position_ _on behalf of_ _Nero Scaeva_ _or an associate of_ _Nero Scaeva_ _. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief_ _you will not in the course of your duties during your tenure in this position allow any aspect of Ironworks property to make_ _its way into_ _the_ _hands of_ _Nero Scaeva_ _.  
  
_ Jessie, who has never met Nero Scaeva, doesn’t have any problem signing.

Jessie Jaye has worked at Garlond Ironworks Body, Autoshop, & Hackerspace for exactly thirteen days, nine hours, eight minutes, and twenty-seven seconds when she meets Nero Scaeva.

The man walks facefirst into the closed office door. Plasters himself to it like a bug on a fucking windshield, mashed into the glass like a cartoon character. After a moment he pushes himself up, rights his hair with a not-so-graceful toss of his head, straightens his sunglasses, and opens the door, throwing it so hard it bangs against the wall, before striding in.

Jessie hates him on sight.

“You.” Douche points at Jessie. “I have no idea who you are. Where’s Cid.”

Jessie says: “What the fuck.”

Imagine the following: you are Jessie Jaye, thirty years old, presently single. You have a PhD with high honors from the Garlean Academy and you have just spent the better part of six months finagling your way into escaping from Garlemald to the relatively more reasonable environs of Eorzea to work for your lifelong hero, the best engineer on the planet. Who now lives in Revenant’s Toll (which is _barely_ a somewhere) running a car shop, because spite(?). You have been working what basically amounts to your dream job for less than two weeks, when a complete stranger walks into your place of work by faceplanting into the door like he’s running a one-man-band slapstick comedy routine by playing low-status to an inanimate object.

(Little does Jessie know, Nero’s entire _life_ is playing low-status to various different inanimate objects.)

Douche is:

  1. Six fulms six ilms;

  2. Wearing one of a kind wraparound mirror sunglasses that, somehow, manage to emanate Pure 100% Undiluted Douche Energy;

  3. Is what a taint would sound like if it could talk;

  4. Wearing a t-shirt that’s says “I was once hired to beat a cow to death in a rice field using only small porcelain figures” and somehow manages to clash in four different ways with his salmon cargo shorts;

  5. Bleached hair. Badly bleached hair. So are his eyebrows. And also possibly his stubble. Who _does_ that;

  6. He looks like he eats glue.




Douche whips off his sunglasses. “Where is Cid.”

“He’d _better_ be in the garage.” They have shit to do today. They have four cars that need to be fixed today. Cid spent the last two days MIA apparently investigating a wiring problem at a stoplight a four hour drive away.

Douche sighs, in the deeply put-upon way that Jessie is beginning to associate with People Who Know Cid Garlond, and puts his sunglasses back on. She’s not entirely clear on why he took them off in the first place, now he’s put them back on. Aesthetic? “Of course,” Douche continues, casually dragging his hand along the wall to find the handle to the door into the garage, “No rest for the wicked, as they say, or in this particular case I am sure no rest for the terminally bored.” Douche shoves the door open with his foot, and yells into the garage: “Cidolfus!”

Jessie can smell blood in the water from five malms, and she _immediately_ follows, because whatever’s about to happen she needs all the details on.

Douche, cool-as-you-please, strolls into the garage. He puts a hand out to the side of one of the raised cars to duck it, bent almost double because he’s so tall, grunts in surprise when he puts his foot into Wedge’s open toolbox/lunchbox (three for three sandwiches left in open toolboxes obliterated for the week, Jessie needs to instigate a no-open-food-in-the-garage policy) and stops at the side of the car where Cid is working, flat on his back with only his legs sticking out.

“Cid,” Douche repeats, patiently. “I regret to inform you that I can, in fact, tell you're there. I can sense you.”

“Drown,” the underside of the car replies. “What do you want. How did you get in here.”

“The door. They’re a fascinating technology; a recent development, I hear. This incredible concept, a larger, solid object attached to several hinges that can swing open and shut with very little exerted effort? I’m certain you’re familiar with it.”

“You have been banned from the premises of this shop for over a _year_. I wrote it on the _door_.”

Nero snorts decisively. “That won’t stop me, I can’t read.”

“It’s in _braille!_ ”

“You heard me, Garlondo. I’m afraid your newest recruit had no idea of your _stringent_ requirements on the premises. You really must add some proper onboarding. Perhaps a basic self-defense lesson: how to injure the disabled, a two-step program.”

“I’ll injure you in one,” Cid replies, and then thwacks Douche on the toe with a wrench. He yelps, hopping backwards, sputtering something under his breath in Garlean in a dialect Jessie couldn’t guess at if you paid her, and he aims a kick at Cid’s knee. He misses by about a malm.

Cid slides out from underneath the car a moment later, wrench raised threateningly. He looks about ready to commit a murder. “What in hells do you want, Nero?”

“Can a soul not simply want to see his best friend?” Nero is pouting as he prods his toe. He’s wearing proper shoes, although the combo of Birkenstocks with his Everything Else is just real deep cursed energy. He either doesn't notice or doesn't care that Cid’s expression could curdle milk. “Honestly, you act as if I am your own personal curse, a pox upon your house, and here I drove all this way just to lay my eyes upon your tender visage—“

“I’ll tender _your_ visage—“

“Empty threats are hardly becoming, Garlondo. Nevertheless, if I _must_ present you with an appropriate excuse for my sincere desire to merely bask in the endless, eternal glow of your brilliant presence—“

“Just so we’re clear, I think I have legal recourse to self-defense if I murder you.”

“—As much as asking is begrudging and a grave insult to my delicate sensibilities, I am in _dire_ need of your expertise on a project of the utmost importance. On the metaphorical bended knee.” Cid seemed to be taking the measure of if he could make it a _literal_ bended knee via inventive application of wrench-to-kneecap. “Cidolfus Garlond, light of my life, pain of my ass, I have taken this damn fool microfiche reader apart three separate times and all I’ve succeeded in doing is getting it to project _upside down_ , which would be quite impressive, were it not so very annoying.”

Cid is making A Face. Jessie knows That Face.

Oh no.

“Where is it.”

“In my car. It’s terribly heavy.” Nero shrugs. There is something about his shrug that activates Jessie’s lizard brain, and she has never been so very quickly felt her fight-or-flight instincts kick in. She has an immediate, almost-overwhelming desire to shove Nero in front of an oncoming train. “I’m afraid I’d snap my little arms if I lifted it. I need some big, strong engineer to come carry it for me.” Cid groans and finally gets up.

(Jessie could _swear_ that she hears Wedge whisper “So _that’s_ what they’re calling it now.”)

“Where’d you park that fucking death-trap. If it’s within a malm I’m towing it back here and destroying it for scrap.”

“Oh, _please_.” Nero follows Cid out, walking like someone had conceptualized what a daddy longlegs could look like if it was a) a person and b) unimaginably terrible in every single possible way. Jessie has shared less than three full sentences with Nero, and she is already completely certain he is the worst person alive. “What do you take me for, an _imbecile_?”

“Yes,” Cid interjects, but it does no good.  
  
“You have made your stance on my car’s continued existence quite clear. Rest assured, it is _well_ outside of your malm-radius demands, so you can fully enjoy the experience of hauling my microfiche machine _alllllll_ the way back.”

“You fucking wish. _I_ can drive wherever I want. Including you into a lake.”

“You don’t make a compelling argument for getting in your car—“ Their voices vanish out the front door, which bangs shut behind them, the strains of their ongoing argument outside audible, even if the precise words are garbled.

Biggs goes over and, sadly, starts trying to sort out what out of his lunch is still edible. “You need to close that,” Wedge says, for the third time this week. Biggs makes a noncommittal noise. Still doesn’t close it. “One of these days it’s going to injure someone.”

“I wish it had injured Nero,” Biggs mutters.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Jessie turns back to the two of them. “Who the _fuck_ was that.”

“Nero Scaeva,” Wedge says, like that means anything to her. She blinks vaguely at him. “He’s.” Wedge scratches the bridge of his nose. “I mean, you just met him.”

“I got the _literally scum off of the underside of a toilet seat_ vibe. Like someone took a bag of cheese curds and cursed them into sentience but only once they were expired. An evil giant banana candy. A fucking string cheese gijinka. A black hole. But made of incels.” She could go all day. “But who in hells _is_ he? Why is he _here_?”

“Nero was the Chief’s roommate at the Academy,” Biggs finally closes his lunchbox. “Bet’s out on whether or not they fucked, but my money’s down on they didn’t. Because, like,” Biggs’ face does a complicated journey. “You seen him? I think if you fucked him you’d smell like slug slime for the rest of eternity.”

“Ew,” Wedge mutters.

“Anyway, he moved after Cid when the Chief came out here, and now sometimes he shows up and is annoying.”

When Cid stomps back in twenty minutes later carrying a weird boxy-looking-computer-thingy, he drops it on the counter in front of her. “Take this apart,” he mutters. “I need to go snort rubbing alcohol or something and get the scent of his shitty douchebro pomade out of my nose.” Cid pauses, and then turns back to Jessie. “I should have explained Nero sooner,” he sighs. Rubs the back of his neck. “I keep hoping he’ll stop terrorizing my employees and ruining my life.”

“Yeah, I have like...at least four questions.”

“Trust me, if I had any answers to any of them, I’d give them to you. If I ever figure out what he’s up to, ever, you’ll know. Immediately.”

“What was he _doing_ here?”

“Being a pain in the ass and giving me his pet projects.” Cid goes back into the garage as he speaks, Jessie follows, arms crossed. “The only things that are important to know is that Nero’s not allowed in this building, ever, or I’ll personally remove every bone in his fucking body and make them into flour. If he _does_ show up again, there’s a bag of marbles under the counter, just empty them onto the floor in the office. It’ll get rid of him.”

Why is working for this man like living a slapstick comedy. From hell.

“Unless—“ Cid stops, turns back to her. “Unless he ever drives his car close enough you can see it. You can’t miss it. It’s hideous. It’s a Volvo that I think was old when they invented the wheel and it’s this shade of red that’s like if one of those shit display-apples fucked a maraschino cherry.” Jessie can feel her face do Something and she doesn’t like it. “It’s hideous. If you see that car, for any reason, within visible distance of this building, I need you to do whatever it takes to trap Nero somewhere so I can impound that fucking monstrosity.”

“Why?”

Cid looks back at her.

“He’s blinder than a stump.”

“Like... _legally_?”

“If anything, _il_ legally. He has a driver’s license!” Cid throws his arms in the air as he’s talking, stomps across the garage. “So help me one of these days I am going to stuff him into a suitcase, mail him to Merycadia, and impound his car.”

Jessie abruptly decides she disagrees with Biggs.

Cid and Nero have _definitely_ fucked.


End file.
